How is value determined in a socialist society? I am lead to understand that it is use-value...

so

Value is determined by socially necessary aggregate labor time. Use-value and exchange-value are reflected to be the exact same thing, so exchange value will no longer obscure the exploitative processes by which commodities are produced. This would probably be reflected in labor notes, where say a 5 hour labor note could buy a commodity that took 5 hours (on average) to produce.

Exploitation in the technical Marxist sense means working for someone who owns the means of production and pays you a wage which is a fraction of the value you actually produce during an allotted amount of time and expropriates the surplus value. If you controlled the means of said grain production, you would receive and realize in monetary terms the full value you produced. The situation you're specifically talking about it sounds like is the state appropriating all grain harvested to redistribute. If you as a worker are still receiving the full value of the grain you produced (and under the dictatorship of the proletariat model, technically all workers own all the means and are simply represented by the vanguard state party / government), no exploitation is taking place. In practice this isn't really how it worked in the USSR (there were still factory managers who played a functionally superior role) but it's also infinitely more complicated than that.

There is nothing wrong with money as long as it isn't capital. I don't know why Marxists hate money so much except the meme of worshiping money.

There needs to be an adjustment. 5 hours of wading through sewer filth should not be the same as 5 hours of having fun doing shit. Or 5 hours getting lung cancer in a coal mine should not be the same as 5 hours sitting in an office.

Why the fuck would you think that.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" only applies to the higher phase, when everything is free and all remaining labour is voluntary. In the lower phase it would be: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution".

The dictatorship of the proletariat exists during the revolutionary process as communism being established, actual communism is stateless. And as for the notion of a "party-state" for the most part only tankies believe this is a good idea. For the rest of us the dictatorship of the proletariat means government by the entire proletariat (minus reactionaries), not being governed by a bunch of self styled representatives.

Because socialism hadn't been established in the USSR, it was a failed attempt.

Money can very easily become capital even when private ownership of capital is officially disallowed (black market enterprises for example). Abolishing money and replacing it with a non-circulating alternative such as labour vouchers/labour credit would tend to prevent the formation of informal private enterprises, something which is very important given what happened in the soviet union.
Also money simply won't be able to exist once the higher phase of communism is reached, as there will be nothing to exchange it for.

A fair point, though it's worth pointing out that there are alternatives to doing this: instead of adjusting rates of pay you could implement work sharing schemes where people are required to do some of the shitty work along side the enjoyable work (with the exception of areas of work with labour shortages anyway).

So can a barter economy. So can secretly making the tools of production in your back yard in the dead of night with only your labor and some twigs.

Forcing everyone to use debit cards from the central bank would help a lot because it would increase the need to and difficulty of laundering.

What's going to keep my entertainment industry growing, or by that time, will there be a surplus of digital media so that I could not consume it all in my lifetime, therefore making media technically a non scarce good?

That's inefficient. Marx lamented the loss of skilled labor where a worker could be good at what he did.

Is that what they told you over at reddit? We're actually not capitalists larping as communists here.

You won't be able to directly purchase anything from public stores with bartered goods (or alternative currencies for that matter), meaning such a market will be unable to generalise. It wouuldn't completely prevent black market activity by itself but would certainly make it less profitable.

Yeah completely abolishing cash would go a long way too, but by itself it wouldn't necessarily stop people from privately employing others, something that vouchers/labour credit actually does. You'd have to couple it with active suppression of private enterprise for it to have the same effect.

Media is already a non-scare good in terms of reproducibility, it only seems to be scarce because of intellectual property. As for initial production: creative work is one of those inherently enjoyable things that people will do for free provided they have their needs satisfied. Just take a look at all the people producing free media that exists today, then imagine a society where such people aren't denied access to the means of production or restricted by the need to hold down a day job.

It's certainly not ideal but pay grades aren't without their problems either. In either case it's a temporary solution to one of the problems of a society transitioning out of capitalism, fully developed communism won't have either.

He also lamented a division of labour where massive chunks of the population get locked into doing the same boring shit day in day out instead of being able to pursue their interests. The vast majority of work becomes an utter chore if it's all you ever do and rotating through multiple areas can relieve the tedium crappy jobs while preventing social divisions from arising based on profession (though obviously it can't apply to areas with a shortage of expertise: that can't only be amended though education).

While the notion of a "welfare state" is obviously incompatible with communism (communism is stateless), even marx advocated a welfare system of sorts during the lower phase of communism to care for people unable to work for whatever reason (seriously it's in the Critique of the Gotha Program), and in the higher phase everything is free so it's a moot point.

Organized crime could just as easily make their own money. You could literally have something like bitcoins start up. Lack of state currency doesn't mean someone else won't find another way of simulating currency.

The future is bleak. I want quality and I want new. I don't want to watch I love Lucy or some guy doing a vidya stream on a 2027 console. There are things that require hard unpleasurable work.

I don't care is comrade manager has a house that's two times as big and has a gold plated trabant. I only care if comrade manager has capital.

Unlike you I plan for the chance that it may be an unacheivable goal, so I want to make every step on the way there a decent one and not Stalinism. You know what, if communism works everything out, that's fine. But you have to come up with a better argument than because it does, or you need to have a plan B.

Someone has to be comrade janitor. I'm fine with you wanted to fuck around and change careers constantly. You just get compensated according to you contribution. If you waste time doing 10 different internships, that's not a very big contribution, but maybe you think the experience of doing 10 things is compensation in of itself. Good for you.

Most people get better at their jobs over time. And variable paygrades has the perfect solution for shortage of labor within a certain industry.

Here is the wiki on alt currency
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_currency

If the state does not issue currency, a black market could still issue currency. If a black market can operate under the radar, so can an issuer of alt currency. Currency is not the root of black markets. It is simply the vehicle.

I already covered this:

I wasn't thinking about fucking youtube when I said that, but rather video game mods: some total conversions can be quite impressive (and if you think you all the work involved is fun then you've never heard of UV mapping). That said, plenty of people volunteer to work on things without a monetary rewards, even tasks which are quite arduous. In a society in which socially necessary labour has been eliminated people will have a choice between being bored shitless or organising themselves to create things. Personally I would volunteer to work but if you're a lazy cunt then that's your problem. Not everyone is like you.

I wouldn't care either, if I didn't think that high earning had the potential to become capital.

Fucking what? I just spent several fucking posts talking about the lower phase of communism (AKA socialism in the leninist sense of the term). As for the higher phase of communism not happening: do you think that technology is going to magically stop advancing? That we are gonna be stuck at this level forever? Even at our level of technological development we could eliminate the vast majority of work through automation, and much of what's left could be cut down simply by eliminating unproductive "industries" like marketing, insurance and finance (which getting rid of market exchange would achieve).
In fact, by the time we get around to actually having a communist revolution the question may not be "can the higher phase happen?" but rather "do we need a lower phase?".

If a work sharing scheme were to be implemented, janitors probably wouldn't exist as a distinct profession. Cleaning work would simply be done by those that work at a given work place, many workplaces do this even today.

Who said anything about "changing careers", by work sharing I merely meant that workers that do popular work also have to do some less popular work (with necessary exceptions). In other words if you want to be a professional writer/artist/whatever you'd also have to spend some time doing shit work like cleaning.

True, but having multiple work streams and requiring people who work in a higher stream to also work in a lower one, can have the same effect.

Yeah I'm well aware of what they are, but as I said earlier: If they can't be exchanged at public outlets, a market based upon them won't easily be able to generalise. You wouldn't be able to acquire publicly produced good directly and would have to buy them second hand from people who had purchased them legitimately and pay a markup as a result. This might not stop people from engaging in such activity but it would certainly make it harder to accumulate capital through such activity.

Just to clarify for anyone else who may have the wrong idea: I'm not wedded to the idea of work sharing, I merely suggested it as a potential alternative to pay grades.

But anything you could possibly buy is already free (or rationed) without money. The issue given with currency was a black market. If you're trading rationed goods, then you trade in your extra left shoe for some black market barterbucks and buy something else. A state currency doesn't make it that much easier to acquire capital.

They're not making game engines

Or consume, depending on relative scarcity.

None of you is doing any of the tedious work improving drivers, engines or hardware. This is boring stuff and you will never see your creation. This is far beyond mapping. The best it does is you can think "I enabled that"

there's no value in socialism jesus

What if the job is skilled and shitty? That is if you keep doing it you are more efficient at it. Say there's a special kind of future toilet. For every 500 hours you spend cleaning future toilets, you are 10% faster.

I don't put that much blind faith in predictions of material determinism. Nor do I have a good conception of what high level communism would actually be, only what definition is has to meet.

With enough surplus for everyone, there's the potential for anyone to accumulate capital. Those with and without are not based on relative income, but instead relative consumption. The only ways I can think of to prevent this is police capital acquisition, or not give so much back to the worker.

Wait, are you talking about the lower or higher phase here? If everything is free then money (or vouchers/labour credit for that matter) simply won't exist. As for state currency: you only need to look at the way black markets operated in the soviet union to see the problem: people steal from workplaces and factories and then sell the stolen good onward, allowing a kind of black market capitalist class to form.

People volunteer to do shittier work than programming all the time. On the other hand the development of increasingly powerful AI may render this a moot point.

Based on this comment I can only assume you've never experienced long term unemployment, simply living to consume gets bring fast. Eventually you desire to create things, even if there's no real reason to.

Don't presume to know what the rest of us are doing. You don't know what tedious and boring is until you've worked in a factory or warehouse.

The point of communism isn't to be more "efficient" in the capitalist sense of the term, but rather to liberate workers from exploitation alienation and forced work. If being less efficient is the price to pay for an enjoyable life then I'm prepared to accept that.

You don't need faith to see that technology has a labour saving bias, that the amount of goods that can be produced per labour hour has risen massively over the last century and continues to rise.

This is a fair point, it may simply be that the only way to prevent capital accumulation during the lower phase of communism is to heavily police such activity (obviously giving less to the worker undesirable).

By the way, have you ever read "Towards a New Socialism"? It has some interesting things to say regarding the organisation of the lower phase of communism. Though it's written by a stalinist so you've got to take it with a grain of salt (Believes the USSR was actually socialist, thinks socialism in one country makes sense etc). Aside from the usual stalinist idiocy it contains one of the most thorough discussions of how the lower phase could actually function.

I'm probably going to get blasted because I haven't read much theory, I am but a pleb. Still, here's my take:

Value would be synonymous with importance. Value is determined by how important something is for humans' well-being, and as we know: value is dependent on situation. People would get their share of necessities and luxuries to the extent it is possible considering sustainability. When well-being is taken care of, having even more of initially important things may not always make sense, and hoarding and stealing would not be necessary. At first these things will probably need to be controlled, but as society gets used to the absence of competition enforcing these things may end up unnecessary. As for personal property value I'll use myself as an example: I want to breed fish and propagate corals, have an orchard and brew wines, ciders, meads, and beers, run a composting facility. So it would make no sense for me to live in a city or the suburbs ,and I would probably not get the best patches of farmland either as I'd mostly produce luxuries and not necessities. And I'd be fine with it, and I would request a general area I'd like to live in and I'd probably work things out with a local council or something, idk…

Of course. But why would people not work? Capitalism, feudalism, and all previous societal models have made work a necessary evil, a chore we need to do in order to survive. Work in capitalism symbolizes our lost freedom. Capitalism has perverted our natural tendency to be creative and make things, physical or theoretical. Work has become our enemy, and brainless entertainment has become the savior. Under socialism we would be more free to choose people could finally start to work because they want to work, because they want to contribute, because they want to create, without the burden of worrying about earning enough money. Also, robotics and automation will be even more important.

You harvest more grain than you need. I make more bread than I need. The workers at Miele make more ovens than they need. The professors at university enriches your view of all reality. Scientists make new things possible. These things are shared, no one is exploited, everyone benefits.

Capitalism has entrenched itself by, among other things, making us loathe work and thereby thinking working for "free" completely idiotic. Not working for money does not mean you work for free, you work for the mutual benefits of all of society.

Theoryautismos: I'd appreciate comments on this.

It's still possible without state money. But, yes, it doesn't need to be perfectly fungible transferable money.

Black market capital still an issue, but more of a symptom of shortages that could not be met by the legitimate economy. Really the key is keeping capital small enough that you can't be a market manipulator, and you probably aren't hiring anyone but yourself. So it really is nothing more than worker owned capital, which is not the worst thing in the world.

For direct compensation, not because you're bored. After being unemployed and done consuming stuff, did you decide one day, I'm going to do mindless factory work to make society a better place?

The point where efficiency is what gives you high standard of living, time off of work, consumable stuff etc.

And that part where you're forced to do shit work to do fun work, when there's someone else perfectly willing to do all the shit work and let you do all the fun work for some form of compensation.

What drives technology? The fact that porky wants to save on labor. When the worker wants the status quo of the "enjoyable life", for what reason is there for new technology?

That doesn't mean that there will ever be a perfect welfare state, or porky won't make you a serf for the hell of it. Wealth distribution is an important part of it. Porky could use all the new productivity to build pyramids for himself.

Small amounts of capital are not that terrible. If you only have enough capital for your own labor, who are you alienating or exploiting? Can a self-employed person alienate and exploit himself? If you have a small amount of capital, how can you manipulate the market?

To emphasize on this.

Say you work at a factor that assembles Trabant engines. Good news comrade, we have new machine that cuts the labor needed by half. Now your work days are half as short. Why does comrade Trabant engine assembler only work half as much as me? Well comrade janitor it is because he is twice as productive now. Well I want to work at the Trabant engine factory. Hmm this is a problem we can't have everyone working at a Trabant factory. It's hard to say he gets to work half as much just because. Our choices are to make Trabant assembly less efficient again, needlessly using labor-time for no reason but fairness, or we could cut the employees by half and have them find new jobs, or we could reduce the
or compensation.

And so the factory worker does not benefit from this new technology, unless it's a co-op or such where they can directly take a share of the profit without regard to the rest of society.

But society as a whole benefits from less labor-hours being spent for the same productivity, if you average it out, maybe everyone gets an average of 15 seconds cut from their work day, even though it is an inconvenience to the laborer.

You make it sound as if people aren't capable of any higher thought whatsoever, merely reacting to our environment like some kind of fucking amoeba. If what you're saying was true there wouldn't be any blue sky research occurring, people wouldn't be in favour of spending money of space exploration and other areas where there's no obvious payoff, and yet this simply isn't true: NASA has an approval rate of around 70% for fucks sake. People want to spend money on it.
You also seem to think that people aren't capable of seeing the value in planning for the long term: one particular advance might only reduce the average work day by 15 seconds, but many advances are going to add up. As such people are going to want to delegate resources to research and development even without an immediate payoff.

You're starting to sound more like a typical lolbert the more you argue. Next you'll be talking about the NAP.

That's the point. It's technology that has a payoff that threatens the worker. Technology with no immediate payoff is little different from entertainment. The technology that could make a difference now, instead of far in the future after you've retired so no one has to be forcibly laid off.

try to minimise costs. These costs include wages. Firms often introduce new
technology in order to cut the workforce and reduce labour costs. Although this
use of technology is frequently against the immediate interest of the workers
directly involved, who lose their jobs, it is to the ultimate benefit of society.
Reconcile the benefit to society with the threat to the immediate interest of the worker in a socialism where some amount of fair work must be done. I don't even see where he attempts to reconcile it, except saying
His proposed method is attempting to accurately determine labor costs, as that was a failure of the USSR.

That entire thing was meant to be a quote.

If the you have a co-op/syndicate deciding whether they should do R&D or adopt a new technology, and the workers like their jobs, the answer is no, they will not accept it in a system of labor-vouchers where compensation is based on labor-time. They would suddenly be creating less work for themselves, especially if they were producing to a quota, not taking a product to market. Change is inconvenient.

This is the technology contradiction. Capitalism has contradictions where the interests of the few are at odds with the interests of society.

The same is the case here, except the few are workers, not capitalists. They will freely support the research with no immediate pay-off, but the technology that lets society use less labor-hours for superior productivity, this they will deny if given the choice. If the idea socialism/communism is "liberate workers from exploitation alienation and forced work" and in doing so they give this decision making power to the workers it affects, they will place themselves over society. They will not do R&D because of the compensation scheme.

Then this decision must be done on the scale of society, not smaller unions of workers. If the 3rd party issuer of labor-vouchers does the R&D reducing the socially-necessary-labor-time, then the workers are inconvenienced, and will resent the 3rd party, probably the state. It solves the contradiction, but creates a specific target causing alienation. Who does society choose who to alienate with R&D?

This is the inherent contradiction of efficicency between the worker and society.

This is only true in a market economy, where such decisions are handled at the level of the individual firm, in a communist society individual enterprises independent from society don't exist. The decision to engage in certain R&D is made by the federation of works councils (or whatever administrative organs exist), a minority may object but ultimately the interests of society take precedence.
I'm not sure why you've raised the issue of co-ops here, at no point in this thread have I advocated such idiocy.

I absolutely agree. See above.

A public administration consisting of a federation of workers councils rather than a "state" in the marxist sense of the term, but I guess in this context it's carrying out the same function.

I'm not sure that it makes sense to speak of alienation in this context, as all of society would be involved in the decision to some extent and everyone would be affected to some extent. The idea of the entirety of society alienating itself is a pretty amusing thought though.

It's not. There are exchanges of goods in a socialist society, so there's no need to determine the value of goods.

No: value and use-value are two different things.

It can't. That's why people currently use value, and not use-value.

Yes. But in socialism, the more you work, the more you get. This trait, inherited from capitalism, will tend to disappear until we reach upper-stage communism. Then working will just be a pleasure.

No.

For others and for you.

You give labour to society. In return, society gives you bread (and everything else you need).

Correction:

Value does not need to determined. It is inherent to the commodity. What you're thinking of is price, which will not exist, at least not as it does now.

hwow do u get iphones in commnism

A majority can still alienate a minority.

i don't think he/she was saying that the control of society by the majority is what, in itself, makes it not alienating.

Capitalism and the market decides value upon the average labour-time needed to reproduce a commodity, and most socialists suggest that in socialism we should abanon the average labour-time and just go with labour-time. However in such a case there is no way at all to quantify quality, i.e. someone that is more productive in 5 hours than another person will not be earning more for more productive work. Obviously there is indeed no incentive to work harder if you work only to earn commodities, which is a huge problem.

The only way to solve this - in my opinion - is to abolish the division of labour immediately and to make everyone produce what they need themselves as much as possible or in little communions of people with similar interest or as Marx called them - Unions of free individuals that together choose to create something. Seeing how your own labour directly contributes to obtaining the commodities (althuogh at this point they aren't really commodities) will make the "incentive" part irrelevant - you work to get your use, to consume, directly - you don't work in an alienated way in order to obtain currency (whether it is money, which quantifies average labour time needed for reproduction or labour coupons which quantifies labour time only).

This is one of the main reasons I've become not very invested with socialism as practical thing lately. If we want to liberate society we need to make a huge jump and abolish the division of labour and alienation altogether. Until then, money is indeed the best system and without alternative.

>socialism

I didn't mean "locally", I mean by themselves for themselves, i.e. using the hopefully big machines that are around to produce the commodities they need.

If socialism cannot produce the wealth people want to heath due to lack of productivity people will revert to capitalism, it is that simple. If a labour voucher system, i.e. only labour time is quantified and not productivity is installed and wealth is still easily created for everyone there is absolutely no need for money or trying to force productivity.

Labour vouchers is a different concept than money and quantifies something entirely different as I said. And I also said why I think it wouldn't work and why money is superior.

*people want to have

people do not produce things for themselves as individuals in socialism
they produce things for those who need it

this is Marxism 101. Socialism requires a certain development of the forces of production. That said, we reached the level of development required over a century ago.
More to the point, what people "want" will radically change.

1. Money and labor vouchers are not comparable. They do not perform variations of the same social function. They only do in the realm of exchange (which is part of the reason they will fade away as the communist productive relations establish and concrete themselves). There are not representatives of abstract labor (the essence of value) like money is. The abstraction of labor from its specific concrete forms is not an integral part of the socialist productive process, it is only relevant to book keeping and distribution.
Labor vouchers only exist as remnants of capitalism anyway, they will fade away as communism develops.
2. They way you use the term "force" implies that there is some conscious entity deciding whether or not productivity needs to be forced, rather than as an necessary development of society
3. Labor will become re-integrated with play and within a directly process.
People work because they want to, and they will understand themselves as part of the material community.

I got ya

I honeslty simply disagree. I know that there is this popular meme that people all enjoy working and that it will be integrated with play and it will be all fine. But honestly, how do you expect allt hese college hipster kids to work productively out of their own volition if not to produce the goods they need for themselves? Personally I would prefer to read books all day rather than work. As a communist I want to abolish work for the community for sure, I want communism to be the society to enable the free development of all, not the solidarity bogus society in which everyone works for each othera nd we have to forcibly change "what people want" so they like doing that. Please no.

I'm not that poster, but if we haven't reach a level of development where everything can be provided by machines then people will have to work for the common good if society isn't to completely collapse. There's no way around the fact that modern industry is dependent on social production, unless you'd rather be plowing a field under feudal conditions then we'll have to work together to produces the things we need.

Cum bagels. 1 neat thing = 1.2 cum bagels.
You see, If I make 5 electric snakes, I can tell all of communist this is 5x1.2+1 cum bagels. This also works nice for age.

the fuck?

Work will be abolished.

Labor will be the way the material community realizes its needs. Its separation from other aspects of life will be negated by the working class abolishing itself and seizing the whole of society establishing the transitory dictatorship of the proletariat during the process.

People don't enjoy working.
That is the part of the horror of class society (reaching its height in commodity society).

1. "College", with all other forms of bourgeois education will be abolished.
2. The change in material process, of social relations, during the revolution will change the way labor is not just thought about, but done. There will be no such thing as an "individual producing goods privately to meet his needs". It will not be a social possibility, nor could it even be easily conceptualized. Only in thought experiments trying to visualize how people in previous societies thought could such ideas really be thought.

All labor is directly social there is no such thing as "meeting one's own needs in private" only an individual meeting their own needs to recreate themselves as a component of the community.

So would I, capitalist "work" is fucked up.

So far we are on the same page.

"We" don't "forcibly change" what people "want". Three interrelated factors do:
1). The necessity to abolish the status quo
2). The engagement in practical revolutionary activity
3). The change in productive relations.